256 color 16x16 tiles

[svenvandevelde]

What is the best method for loading 256 tiles in 8bpp (256 colors) of 16x16 dimension into the vera vram?

This is 65536 bytes so this a full bank!

Bank 0 contains the characters at f800, so should not be overwritten. 

Using bank 1 has weird side effects. I hear sounds when I fill the whole bank. 

Any advice?

Sven

 

[JimmyDansbo]

I am thinking that the answer is: You Can't

When that is said, you could overwrite F800 and then just do a reset when your software is done, that way the character map will be reloaded.

[StephenHorn]

You get to choose your poison:

• Copy the VRAM data you want to preserve to somewhere else, where it'll be out of the way.
• Clobber the VRAM data you would have otherwise been preserving.

There is no reason you have to keep the character set at $0F800. If you intend to use it, copy it to somewhere else in VRAM and update the layer data that would use it, accordingly.

I also want to point out that the VERA does not have "banks" in the sense that I think you mean. It simply has 128KB of addressable memory, however the tail end of that (starting at $1F9C0) is overlapped with the audio generator, followed by the palette, and finally sprite attributes. So don't clobber that area with pixel data.